Nevada Barr - The Rope

Both hands on one wall, both feet on the other, Anna twisted until she could slam her back flat against the wall. There was a wet sucking sound. Anna shrieked and started to slide. Grabbing the collar of her shirt, Jenny held her in place. “Straighten your legs,” she said with a degree of calmness she would congratulate herself on should they survive. “Push out. I’ve got you. Shoulders back. Steady.”

Anna got herself wedged tight again, soles of her feet on one cliff, shoulders and back on the other. Her legs were not as long as Jenny’s. It would be harder for her to keep up the tension. Jenny wished she’d pushed farther, gotten Anna to a place where the walls were a little closer. That was water under the knees now, crying over spilt blood.

Anna’s face was sheened with sweat and her lips a thin gray line.

“Shoulder went out? Did your shoulder pop out?” Jenny demanded.

“No. I think it started to,” Anna managed. “I could feel the bone slide, but I’m pretty sure it went back.” Gingerly, she raised her left arm. Her face was bleak with remembered pain. The arm rotated. There was no new onslaught of trauma to her already pale cheeks. “Yeah. It went back,” she said. “I feel like a puppet that wasn’t put together very well.”

Jenny managed a nod and looked away to hide the panic in her eyes.

For a minute there was no sound but the dripping of Anna’s trousers into the lake.

“What next?” Anna asked finally.

“I’m thinking,” Jenny said. “Are you getting warm?”

“Are you kidding? I’m sweating.”

Jenny turned her head to look down the ever-narrowing slot. Night was drawing on, and, this far from the sky, it was already difficult to tell rock from water. A few yards from where they sat in thin air, the cliffs came so close together a person would have to turn sideways to squeeze in, the water beneath so pinched a slip could get one’s foot jammed in too tight to pull free. Debris, naked limbs, sharp, dry, and honed to needle points, would be stuck in places; various bits of desert skewered on branches, maybe a long-dead rabbit, rat nests of spiny plants, things washed down in flash floods.

For a few minutes Jenny considered trying to make it out that way. There was no way she could do it before dark. With luck, maybe she could scale the chimney by feel. It was a crevice. It wasn’t like she could wander off-trail. Without boots, helmet, or any other protective gear, she’d be skinned alive, but in four or five or six hours, she could be on the plateau. Maybe. She could light a fire. That would bring the rangers quicker than anything.

A memory of sitting with her sisters in a circle in their grandparents’ backyard, all five of them diligently rubbing two sticks together because their granddad said that was how men made fire before matches were invented, quenched the signal fire idea. None of the sisters’ sticks got warm, let alone burst into flame. By the time Jenny got help—if she didn’t die of exposure after crippling herself on spiny pointy things—Anna would be drowned.

“Damn,” Jenny said to no one in particular.

Anna broke into her thoughts. “The dead person you gave me? I might know who it is—was. The back of his—its—head looked familiar. Or maybe it’s the T-shirt. I don’t know, but it could be the guy who had his back to me and was undoing his pants. If he doesn’t sink we can check his back. He had a tattoo. A turtle, I think.”

“Do you think the other guy was one of the other attackers? The one who held Kay or the one who watched?”

“Could be.”

A beat passed.

“Do you figure there’s a third dead person floating around that we missed?” Anna asked.

“The joint seems full of corpses tonight,” Jenny said. “It’s a regular dead zone.”

“Do you think they got caught in here like us? Then drowned?” Anna asked.

That was exactly what Jenny thought, that they became too exhausted to maintain the muscle tension that was keeping her and Anna high and dry, they fell into the lake, became too hypothermic to stay afloat, and death flowed into their lungs.

“No,” Jenny lied. “They could have fallen, or maybe the third kid—the one you said had dishwater blond hair and acne—killed them and rolled the bodies over the rim of the slot.” Jenny thought it more likely the third bad guy had done to his pals precisely what somebody—maybe the third bad guy himself—did to her and Anna; pulled up the rope so they couldn’t get out, so Anna couldn’t identify him.

After a moment Anna said, “I see a star.”

Jenny tilted her head back and looked up. Night was upon them. The dark at the bottom of the earth was absolute, the water beneath them invisible ink in midnight. In comparison, the slender scrap of sky was translucent and rich with life. The star was the brightest Jenny had ever seen.

“There is no ‘what next,’ is there?” Anna’s voice was soft beside her.

“I actually did have a plan,” Jenny defended herself, though there was no accusation in Anna’s tone. “You really can chimney up out of here at the end of the slot. Unless the rope has been taken or rotted, you can climb out. I hadn’t realized how late it was,” Jenny finished. “I think we’d be worse off trying it in the dark than we are here.”

“You could make it without me,” Anna said.

“No I couldn’t,” Jenny said.

“It’s stupid to stay here. Go for help. I’ll wait. I waited for days in a jar, didn’t I? And there I only had one corpse to keep me company.”

“You had Buddy. Besides, I don’t think I could make it. Trying that slot in the dark without protective gear, I’d end up getting slashed or impaled or wedged and die screaming in pain,” Jenny said honestly.

Anna didn’t reply to that. Instead, she rested her hand on Jenny’s thigh. Jenny took it, entwined her fingers with Anna’s. There wasn’t a lascivious twitch in all of Jenny Gorman’s many cells. When it came to dying, she found she wanted a friend more than a lover. She turned her face in Anna’s direction but could see nothing. The darkness in the slot had become an absolute. Without visual verification, Jenny had the sense they were wedged not a few feet above water level but over a chasm ten thousand feet deep.

Soon they must fall. Anna’s grip communicated the fatigue in her body. Jenny’s own thigh muscles were beginning to tremble the way they did before they cramped or failed.

Anna gasped.

“Slipped,” she explained.

Jenny drew Anna’s arm around her neck. “Move your right leg over mine and put your foot between mine. Stay strong. I can take some of your weight. We’ll keep each other warm.”

“Warm” was a metaphor for “brave.” The night hadn’t cooled much below ninety degrees, and the effort of keeping herself from sliding into the cold water had sweat running between Jenny’s breasts and down her back, making the canyon wall even more slippery.

Anna’s foot nudged hers. “I’m afraid to take it off the wall,” she said. “I’ll take us both down.”

“I’ve got you,” Jenny assured her.

“Your legs are shaking.” Anna didn’t sound alarmed so much as sympathetic. During all of this—the cold, the dead, the pain, the whole mess Jenny had gotten them into—Anna had not complained. Not once. Self-pity was a pool into which Jenny dove deep on occasion. Wee little Ms. Pigeon seemed to have none.

“How come you’re so brave?” Jenny asked; death and the dark making intimate communication possible, even necessary.

“I’m not,” Anna said quietly, her voice deeper than one might expect from so slight a source. “I’m afraid of everything; waking up, going to sleep, living alone, living with someone new. I’m afraid of whoever put me in the jar and cut me. I’m afraid of disappointing my sister. I guess the only thing I’m not afraid of is dying.”